AMD second-gen Epyc CPUs to house 64 cores and 128 threads

Datacenter race is on

AMD has renewed its focus on the high-margin datacenter market by announcing second-generation Epyc processors at its Next Horizon event in San Francisco today.

The market is worth potentially $29bn – $17bn CPU and $12bn GPU – by 2021, according to Dr Lisa Su, AMD CEO. She believes there will be strong double-digit annual growth for professional graphics cards, while CPU sales are also reckoned to increase at a faster rate than in the consumer field. The real money is in the datacenter.

Launched in June 2017, first-generation Epyc, based on the Zen architecture, tops out at 32 cores and 64 threads for the 7601 model, with two processors installable on an SP3 motherboard. The main thrust for AMD has been lower total cost of ownership compared to performance-comparable Intel solutions. To that end, announced today, underscoring Epyc’s infiltration into the datacenter market, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has signed up to deploy a trio of server platforms based on these Epyc processors.

Intel has hit back – ironically, yesterday – with its datacenter-centric Cascade Lake Advanced Performance platform available early next year, housing up to 48 cores on an MCM package equipped with 12 memory channels per chip. The many-core, high-bandwidth datacenter ecosystem race is well and truly on.

For more detailed information regarding the new CPU, please see. hexus.net